Traditional objective methods of evaluating digital video quality and video encoding performance, such as PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and SSIM (Structural Similarity) are commonly employed as a tool to quantify degradation. Although these methods do not necessarily track human perception, they have been deemed suitable to track video coding performance during real-time video coding and coding algorithm development since they quantify the errors (i.e., differences) between the produced distorted pictures and their corresponding reference pictures. However, the structural information inherent in stereo image pairs is a crucial factor in assessing stereo 3D video quality and coding performance. As such, there exists a need to improve existing metrics for stereo 3D video coding.